Security News
A French dad faces jail time and a hefty fine after using a signal jammer to prevent his kids from going online and taking the rest of a nearby town down with them. After a mobile carrier reported the issue to the Agence nationale des fréquences, a public agency responsible for managing the radioelectric spectrum in France, it was determined that a signal jammer was being used to block radio frequencies in the town.
The government of Cambodia has delayed implementation of its National Internet Gateway, because it is yet to acquire the equipment needed to operate the service. The Gateway was announced in February 2021 and quickly attracted criticism on the basis its enabling legislation gives the regime - which has banned opposition parties from contesting elections - the power to force all internet traffic to or from the country, and within its borders, to pass through the Gateway.
Cambodia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has issued a clarification about the role of the "National Internet Gateway" that will commence operations tomorrow, stating that descriptions of it as an instrument of pervasive surveillance are "Unfounded." A Ministry spokesperson insists the Gateway is actually an instrument to "Strengthen national security and tax collection as well as to maintain social order and protect national culture."
Why is a web filtering important and what are the main features necessary for MSPs? Managed service providers have been struggling with finding the right web filtering solutions. Web filtering is necessary for businesses because it prevents the staff from accessing malicious and harmful content while using the corporate network or while working from home, besides offering other advantages like monitoring their performance and keeping it to the maximum to ensure productivity.
Cambodia's National Internet Gateway comes online this Wednesday, exposing all traffic within the country to pervasive government surveillance. As The Register reported when the Gateway was announced in January 2021, Cambodia's regime will require all internet service providers and carriers to route their traffic through the Gateway.
Microsoft on Monday said it's taking steps to disable Visual Basic for Applications macros by default across its products, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio, for documents downloaded from the web in an attempt to eliminate an entire class of attack vector."Bad actors send macros in Office files to end users who unknowingly enable them, malicious payloads are delivered, and the impact can be severe including malware, compromised identity, data loss, and remote access," Kellie Eickmeyer said in a post announcing the move.
Macro code from the internet will at last be turned off by default! If you've been in cybersecurity since the last millennium, you will certainly remember, and may still have occasional nightmares about, Microsoft Office macro viruses.
Amy Zegart has a new book: Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. The intelligence playing field is leveling - and not in a good way.
Taiwanese company QNAP has warned customers to secure network-attached storage appliances and routers against a new ransomware variant called DeadBolt. "QNAP urges all QNAP NAS users to [] immediately update QTS to the latest available version."
It's been a busy week with ransomware attacks tied to political protests, new attacks on NAS devices, amazing research released about tactics, REvil's history, and more. A new DeadBolt ransomware group is encrypting QNAP NAS devices worldwide using what they claim is a zero-day vulnerability in the device's software.